PORT ROYALE 4 CREW FULL
PORT ROYALE 4 CREW LICENSE

This creates another balancing act as you have to ensure you don’t flood your own market with cheap goods and spoil the market. Naturally there is a focus on trade, but making your commodities into finished goods is almost always going to be cheaper than buying it, transporting it, and selling it elsewhere in the long run. Doing it while avoiding lulls in the wind patterns can help ensure you get goods to their destination before the winds of fortune shift, too. Sailing into the wind helps you move goods quickly, and avoiding high-wind areas that can cause damage to your ship is equally as important. Setting up a trade route also means understanding the whims of the sea and the trade winds. The Shipyard is also where you’ll be able to purchase both new and used vessels for your trade or piracy ambitions. You’ll have to visit the shipyard to kick the barnacles loose and tighten the planks periodically lest you risk sinking to Davy Jones’ locker, or worse, springing a leak in battle. Running a trade route requires maintenance. Having paid the price to set up trade, you can now buy and sell there at will.

PORT ROYALE 4 CREW LICENSE

Upon arrival you’ll need to purchase an expensive trade license before you roll off your first barrel.

PORT ROYALE 4 CREW FULL

Loading up a schooner full of warm beer (blech!) and carting it to a nearby town doesn’t guarantee sales or even a warm welcome. You’ll need to establish trade routes to ferry those things from here to there.

These commodities can be transformed into things like furniture and cannon, or traded for goods that the people in other towns can’t get for themselves. If you’ve played a hex-based building game like Civilization, you have a fairly good idea of how this all works.Įach town produces up to seven commodities like grain, beer, sugar, cotton, timber, and steel.

Keeping them content also keeps them in place and working for you, so you’ll need to keep a steady supply of commodities, available housing, farms, and you’ll want to build the occasional tavern or two. A town’s inhabitants work to produce goods that you’ll use to establish trade with other towns. Each town’s lifeblood is gold and commodities, but more than that, people and production. With the tutorial under your wide-brimmed hat, you can move onto managing your tropical paradise, and that starts with your hometown. UX/UI design could use some work in this Caribbean adventure. Similarly obtuse things like setting up trade routes require a bit of repetition before it becomes clear how the game wants to handle these mundane tasks. Hovering over some icons yields nothing in the way of tooltips, and the mechanics of simply juggling your fleet around should be handed with dragging and dropping but is instead clicking indicators to move ships from the left to the right. There are moments where Port Royale 4 is quite obtuse. This reveals a different problem entirely. Convoy management, trade routes, production, and two sequences on naval combat will make you a more steady hand at the tiller, but I’ll readily admit I had to refer back to these tutorials more than once. I don’t normally talk through tutorials, but when the 10 tutorials combined take you roughly an hour to complete, you have a good idea of the complexity of the task ahead of you.

Before you set sail, however, you’ll want to check out the tutorial. It’s a little strange that sandbox mode still forces you into these four archetypes, but you rarely see your captain so it’s almost a moot point. For example, the Merchant doesn’t require a trade license, and can trade with all nations at all times, but combat vessels cost twice as many fame points to unlock, so you’ll be working extra hard for the Viceroy. These characters have two advantages and one disadvantage. You’ll also get to choose a flag color, as well as a standard to emblazon upon it. Starting your campaign you are greeted with four archetypes - a Buccaneer, Piratess, Adventurer, and Merchant. Your trade fleet starts with a single boat that you are granted at the start of the game, but you’ll need a Captain to run the crew. Before you can have any of that fun, legitimate or otherwise, you’ll need a fleet. Trade is your primary source of revenue and power to grow, but that doesn’t mean you can’t traffic in a bit of side hustle to line your pockets, right? Pirates can’t have all the fun. Port Royale 4 puts you into the cavalier boots of an ambitious governor of a small port town in the Caribbean during the 17th century, also known as the Age of Sail.

Port royale 4 crew